China Hit by Second Typhoon in a Week, Nearly 2 Million Evacuated

 

ASEAN NETWORK NEWS | A powerful typhoon named Bavi made landfall in eastern China over the weekend, marking the second major storm to strike the country within a single week. Authorities evacuated close to two million people from areas lying in the storm's path.

Bavi first came ashore in the coastal city of Taizhou on Saturday evening, then made a second landfall near Wenzhou around midnight local time. Before reaching mainland China, the typhoon had already battered a chain of remote Japanese islands and brought heavy rain to Taiwan as it skirted the island's northern tip. The storm's rain bands stretched roughly the width of France from end to end, giving a sense of its massive scale even as it gradually weakened on its northwestward track.

At the time it made landfall, Bavi carried maximum sustained winds of around 144 km/h (90 mph), equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Despite weakening to a severe tropical storm by Sunday, forecasters warned it still posed a significant flood risk given the huge volume of moisture in its cloud bands.

In Zhejiang province, where Wenzhou is located, more than 1.7 million people had been evacuated by Saturday morning, according to China's state Xinhua news agency. Shanghai relocated roughly 34,000 residents from high-risk zones by noon, while Fujian province moved several thousand people from vulnerable coastal areas and placed over 17,000 emergency responders on standby. Further north, torrential rain prompted the evacuation of over 100,000 residents in Beijing, with authorities increasing water discharge from a major reservoir to guard against flooding.

Daily life across the affected region was significantly disrupted: schools, workplaces, transportation, and outdoor activities were suspended in Zhejiang, and hundreds of flights along with dozens of train services were cancelled. China's weather agency issued an orange typhoon alert — the second-highest of four tiers — and also issued the year's first red alert for rainstorms.

In Taiwan, more than 14,000 people were evacuated, mostly from mountainous regions, and hundreds of flights were grounded — Taiwan's fire department reported 113 injuries, mostly from falls involving motorcycles, bicycles, or being struck by debris. Power outages hit over 170,000 households on the island. Japan's remote southwestern islands, particularly the Miyako region, also lost power as the storm passed through.

The typhoon compounded an already difficult week for China: extreme weather earlier in the period, linked to a separate storm called Maysak, had already killed at least 39 people, caused dozens of rivers to overflow, and led to a reservoir dam bursting in southern and central parts of the country.

Bavi originally formed as a super typhoon, striking Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands with wind speeds of up to 290 km/h before weakening as it moved across the Pacific toward East Asia. Landslides tied to the storm earlier killed at least 17–18 people in the southern Philippines, mostly on the island of Mindanao.